 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Image viewer" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(February 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Animage viewer orimage browser is acomputer program that can display stored graphicalimages; it can often handle variousgraphics file formats.[1] Such software usually renders the image according to properties of the display such ascolor depth,display resolution, andcolor profile.
Although one may use a full-featuredraster graphics editor (such asPhotoshop orGIMP) as an image viewer, these have many editing functionalities which are not needed for just viewing images, and therefore usually start rather slowly. Also, most viewers have functionalities that editors usually lack, such as stepping through all the images in a directory (possibly as a slideshow).
Image viewers give maximal flexibility to the user by providing a direct view of the directory structure available on a hard disk. Most image viewers do not provide any kind of automatic organization of pictures and therefore the burden remains on the user to create and maintain their folder structure (using tag- or folder-based methods). However, some image viewers also have features for organizing images, especially an image database, and hence can also be used asimage organizer.
Some image viewers, such asWindows Photo Viewer that come with Windows operating systems, change aJPEG image if it is rotated, resulting in loss of image quality; others offerlossless rotation.
Typical features of image viewers are:
Advanced features are:
| Free software | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proprietary |
| ||||||
| |||||||
 | Thisgraphics software–related article is astub. You can help Wikipedia byadding missing information. |
